Evaluation of intelligent agents in consumer-to-business e-Commerce

Abstract

Electronic commerce has changed traditional business trading behaviors, since consumers can easily consume through the Internet e-commerce platform. The Internet provides numerous products and services, but consumers find it is hard to choose their favorite ones. The consumer-to-business (C2B) is popular in recent years and it has become one of the best choices for customers forming a group to buy products. Thus, more and more consumers participate in online group buying. However, consumers anticipate to different prices when buying products and demand service. Thus, applying an intelligent agent into negotiation can effectively decrease efforts spent on collecting buyer information, transaction costs, and negotiation with sellers.This study proposed a system that applies an intelligent agent into the C2B e-commerce process, and evaluates the system through an experiment. Additionally, a questionnaire is used to investigate the benefits of the proposed intelligent agent systems. Analytical results show that the proposed intelligent system can increase user satisfaction, reduce performance risk, and raise perceived fairness, but nothing help on perceived value. It implied that the system still needs efforts and time to promote in nowadays commerce. If people can understand its value from finding the information they need, it must grant the more perceived value. Additionally, this system is not only applicable to C2B, but it can extend to other e-commerce models, because the agent can help the negotiation between the sellers and buyers.